Victoria Pendragon was born and raised in the vicinity of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is the oldest of eleven. Her life has been defined, as are most of ours perhaps, by conditions that would seem to have been beyond her control. Eighteen years of various sorts of abuse and two diseases that should have killed her rank among the most outstanding of those.

Her study of metaphysics began in early childhood as an attempt to validate the lessons she’d been learning from the earth and the trees whenever she left her body. She has been working as a professional in the field of spirituality since 1995, has read tarot since 1964 and created in 2007, Sacred Earth Seven Element Tarot, a tarot deck designed to bring the world community together.

Victoria began training in art when still a child, eventually acquiring a BFA from The Philadelphia College of Art. Her work hangs in numerous corporate and personal collections, among them The Children’s Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Moss Rehab and Bryn Mawr Hospital Rehab.

She has two children by her first marriage, a son and a daughter, both of whom amaze her. She is currently married to her third husband, a man whose kind soul has created for her an atmosphere of clarity and creativity in which she dances, writes, creates art and helps when asked.

Thank you so much for this interview, Victoria. Sleep is my favorite thing to do! I’d like to have your opinion on just why do we need sleep in the first place?

Victoria: Thank you for having me.

Sleep is still a kind of a mystery to science, although it’s been well documented by now that it’s critical to health – both mental and physical. If you study the ancient Asian tradition of energetic medicine – the one on which acupuncture is based – you’ll see that certain functions of the organs of the body take place only at night.

Can you tell us the story behind the writing of your book? How did you come up with the idea?

Victoria: (laughing) Well, I came up with the idea of the book because a book was the only way to share this technique with the world. Doing it one on one, as I had been, would have been impossible.

As for how I came up with the idea…”I” didn’t; my body did and it did it while I was sleeping, at a time when my body was dying from an incurable disease called progressive systemic sclerosis. My recovery from that disease mystified the physicians…and everyone else…except me. Something – and I couldn’t put my finger on it – had been happening while I was sleeping…something that made me feel that I was alive. (laughing again) I was alive, of course, but feeling alive when people are telling you that you are dying is actually unusual because prior to that time, for about a year, I had simply felt that I was dying…a very different feeling, I can tell you.

About 15 years passed before what had been going on inside me at that time came to my consciousness in a way that was understandable enough to begin to codify it.

Does everyone dream?

Victoria: It is said that they do. Scientists have done enough research by now that seems to indicate that even though certain people do not remember that they dream, they actually do,

Sleep Magic, by the way, has nothing to do with remembering dreams.

What can your book teach us?

What Sleep Magic does is allow you to change your relationship to life…and that really matters a lot. If life seems like a constant struggle, that’s not very rewarding. If you are constantly having one bad relationship after another or can’t seem to find a job you enjoy, then your relationship with life itself is compromised.

But there’s a reason for all those things and that reason is locked in what I call the cellular intelligence of the body. Your body – not you mind! – remembers everything that you have ever seen, heard, touched, felt or tasted. Everything! So there is, in the cells of your body, memory of everything that has ever gone on in your life – even when you were in utero! And a lot of those things – of which you are totally unconscious – are things that have given you information about how the world is.

For instance, perhaps, when you were 2 years old, your parents went bankrupt. You were around, they discussed their problems when you were there, thinking nothing of it; you were “too young to understand.” But your little body could feel the sense of dread and fear and shame and all of that and it felt all those things when money and survival were being discussed…more importantly, your body remembered all of that and so you, as an adult, carry in the very cells of your body – and your brain which affects the thoughts you think! – information that life is a dangerous business…you might lose everything and that affects your relationship to life, affects the kinds of events that happen to you because you – we all – attract to us whatever we are, in sense, made of.

In this case, you’d be made up, at least partially, of fear and anxiety around money.

Sleep Magic can help the body let go of those feelings, even if you don’t “know” that they’re there.

You are a “new thought minister.” What exactly is that?

Victoria: I was ordained, in 2000 as an InterFaith Minister but my practice has always been more as an Inner Faith Minister. I don’t believe that anyone needs “a religion” to be in touch with the spark of the Divine that they carry. I consider myself a spiritual eclectic and I honor everyone’s right to his or her own concept of Divinity.

Were you the kind of child that was inquisitive?

Victoria: I still am.

What kind of a background do you have? Where are you from and where did you grow up?

Victoria: I come from exceptional people, I’ll say that. My mother’s father was an entrepreneur who owned the first chain of movie theaters in the US. He was also a hideous person in his personal life. My father’s mother was an entrepreneur as well – as was her mother before her. She, my grandmother, built the first middle-class subdivision just outside of Havana, Cuba. My paternal grandfather was a physician. Both my parents were pathologists, my mother was world famous as an expert in Sudden Infant Death syndrome. So I came from money, and a sense of entitlement and got sent to really good schools and all the while was enduring some fairly awful sexual and emotional abuse. It made for a challenging life.

If you could wish for one thing, what would that be?

Victoria: That every person in the world would be able to embrace their own essential goodness.

Thank you for this interview, Victoria. Do you have anything else you’d like to add?

Victoria: Thank you for the interview! It was exceptional. Great questions!